Organizations driving to enable rapid response, create a competitive gap, grow top-line revenue and reduce operating costs are evolving to e-business on demand. The journey to e-business on demand requires both long-term vision and a roadmap with incremental milestones and returns that can be measured during business transformation. These milestones and returns are achieved by understanding, focusing, integrating, and streamlining the elements composing the enterprise and its value net.
A comprehensive management environment is required to enable the optimal alignment of the elements of a business architecture (capabilities, strategies, organization, structures, processes, data), and the technical architecture (application software, system software, physical data storage, infrastructure, and hardware) throughout the journey. One technique for facilitating and implementing such a comprehensive management environment is through the use of an enterprise architecture.
An enterprise architecture is an integrating framework comprising all the structural, procedural, computing, communications, and technical information about an organization and its systems, operations, and facilities. A diagram illustrating the structure of an exemplary enterprise architecture 10 is shown in FIG. 1. In particular, FIG. 1 illustrates a general view of an enterprise architecture 10 comprising eight domains, including strategy 121, organization 122, operations 123, data 124, application 125, technology 126, infrastructure 127, and process 128. As shown symbolically by the plurality of interleaved lines 14, many of the enterprise elements within a given domain 121-128 are often used by, or assigned to, enterprise elements located in other domains 121-128. To this extent, as the enterprise architecture 10 changes with time to accommodate changes in business, various enterprise elements will also change to reflect these changes. Unfortunately, as such changes occur, it is often difficult to determine what effect, if any, such changes will have on the other domains in the enterprise architecture, especially over time. For example, resources added to improve one aspect of a business might actually have an unforeseen adverse effect on existing resources that are designed to aid another aspect of the business.
Although there are tools available today that support the creation of an enterprise architecture, none of these tools are capable of rendering layered state diagrams to illustrate the actual or planned use, assignment, retirement, interdependence, etc., of enterprise elements across domains in an enterprise architecture. Further, none of these tools are capable of rendering such layered state diagrams during a user-specified time frame from a user selected frame of reference (e.g., a domain within the enterprise architecture) for a user-specified business scope (e.g., business strategy, information technology (IT), etc.). Such a capability would greatly enhance the value of an enterprise architecture, especially for use in a business that changes frequently (e.g., an e-business on demand).